How was your week? What are you reading? Well, it’s been a minute since I’ve been here – shall we just forget that I took a hiatus and continue on from where we left off?! K. Good. Here’s a look at what I read last week and links I bookmarked.
What I Read Recently
The last book I finished was Angel Down, Daniel Kraus, a 2026 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction. “Amid the carnage of World War 1, 5 men must decide whether a fallen angel is their redemption or their ruin.”
I struggled to get into this book at first. The genre can best be described (by me) as a mashup of literary horror and military fiction. During World War I, an unearthly shrieking unsettles the soldiers in the trenches. Cyril Bagger and a group of other army misfits are sent to deal with the problem, and they find a literal angel who appears to have been hurt. Everyone who looks at the angel sees someone different from their life and wants her for themselves. All this while they are deep within an active battlefield.
I started the eBook, stopped, switched to the audiobook (with EXCELLENT narration from Kirby Heywood) … but even then, I still struggled, so finished with a combination of eBook and audio to get me through. Once the book hit the last quarter or so, it really took hold for me and ended strong. I can totally see why this won a Pulitzer Prize though – the author is a magician with words … literary prose if you will … he makes everything seem so damn dramatic! He experimented with the entire book being one long run on sentence.
There was a palpable, constant tension of being in a war throughout the book, and the horrific details painted a very vivid picture of being surrounded by death, being near death, and the realistic brutalities associated with war every damned minute of the day and night. The author kept us walking a tightrope of intensity. But not everything, even the mundane, needs to be dramatic and described to death – and that’s why it was so hard to get through at first.
But I’m glad I stuck with it – as I said, the second half was stronger for me than the first … And I don’t know how Kirby Heyborne did not win an Audie Award for his narration of this audiobook!
Currently Reading
For the rest of this year, I’m trying to find books for my reading challenges. I went through my Goodreads “Want to Read” list and started Bat Eaters and Other Names for Cora Zeng, Kylie Lee Baker when I saw that I could check off the letter “Z” for my “A to Z” Book Title challenge. This is set during Covid, and Cora, traumatized from seeing her sister get pushed in front of a moving train on the subway after being called “Bat Eater”, is now a crime scene cleaner who is finding bat carcasses at her crime scene clean-ups … and her neurosis seems to be at an all time high – at least she keeps telling herself this because the things she’s seeing and experiencing can’t be real … can it?
Bookmarked
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That’s it from me. Cheers to the week ahead!
